Intel Xeon Platinum 8380: 2021 vs. 2022 Performance For Ubuntu, Clear Linux, CentOS Stream

With Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids expected to make more of a splash coming up, it's a good time to revisit the Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" performance to see how the Linux software performance has evolved since last year's launch. In this article are benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server from May 2021 with CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu compared to fresh installs now of those latest Linux distribution releases.

Back in May 2021 after getting my hands on Xeon Scalable Ice Lake I ran benchmarks with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, CentOS Stream 8, and Clear Linux 34630. On the same server I revisited that testing with carrying out installs of the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, CentOS Stream 9, and Clear Linux 36790 for seeing how the open-source software performance has evolved over the past year and a half.

This testing was with the Xeon Platinum 8380 2P configuration on the Intel M50CYP2SB2U reference server platform, 16 x 32GB DDR4-3200 memory, and INTEL SSDPF21Q800GB NVMe solid-state drive.

Each time the operating system under test was cleanly installed and tested at its stock / out-of-the-box configurations across CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu. So let's see how the Linux performance on Ice Lake has evolved so far over its lifetime.